When Princess Vittoria Alliata returned to Sicily after a decade spent travelling in the Middle East, she found cows roaming the corridors and wild boars sleeping in the ballroom of her family’s abandoned summer palace.
The 18th-century Villa Valguarnera in the town of Bagheria, just east of Palermo, had been overrun by the local mafia and she devoted the next 20 years to clawing back control of each of its 100 rooms.
Alliata now faces a new battle to save another piece of Italy’s cultural heritage — a translation of The Lord of the Rings she completed as a 16-year-old schoolgirl.
She is embroiled in a furious row between left and right-wing intellectuals over the first new Italian translation of the epic since hers was